


Not His Usual Strangeness

by Mandi2341



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Family Fluff, Gen, My First Work in This Fandom, One Shot, Siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-18
Updated: 2020-04-18
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:41:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23724022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mandi2341/pseuds/Mandi2341
Summary: Just a little pre-TRC Gansey sibling one-shot!
Comments: 3
Kudos: 17





	Not His Usual Strangeness

Dick Gansey III had always been a little strange, but ever since he had been discharged from the hospital, his strangeness seemed to have taken a new, neurotic turn. Most nine-year-old boys played outside and got dirty in the summers, but Helen’s little brother sat in the living room, scribbling furiously into the moleskine he insisted on carrying everywhere he went for hours at a time. 

At first, Helen had put it down to the fact that most nine-year-olds weren’t deathly allergic to bees (or wasps, or yellowjackets, or anything with a stinger), and therefore weren’t forbidden from playing in the expansive backyard of their parents’ D.C. mansion. But it seemed like Dick actually preferred to stay indoors, surrounded by books sprawled open, head bent over more often than not, so that he was constantly having to push his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. 

When Helen has managed to flip through the pages of the notebook, however, she’d found pages upon pages of drawings of bees. They were tucked into the margins, hidden in dog-eared corners of a few pages, wrapped around Dick’s oddly neat handwriting. It was obsessive and frantic at times. At other times, it was Dick absentmindedly drawing bees on the back of his hand, on his wrist, until Mother inevitably told him to put the marker down, Dick, it’s dinner time and that’s bad for your skin. 

It wasn’t until he began waking Helen and their parents with his screams in the middle of the night that she began to consider the idea that this obsession might be a little more than Dick’s normal brand of weird. Her room was the closest to his, and she always beat their mother by a few seconds or minutes. 

Dick was thrashing wildly. “No!” he screamed. “No, no, no! Get away!” He was swatting the air around his head so violently that his arms were threatening to tangle him in his comforter. This seemed to only add to his terror. “Get them away, get them AWAY!”

“Dick.” Helen grabbed his shoulders. “Dick! Wake up, kiddo, you’re having a nightmare.”

It took a few seconds of shaking to get him to snap out of it, but he finally blinked himself awake and stared at his sister in wide-eyed terror before realizing he was no longer dreaming. “Helen?” he croaked. “What are you doing?”

He looked over her shoulder, and Helen followed suit to find their mother approaching the bed, her robe wrapped over her pajamas. Father stood in the doorway, and though Helen couldn’t read his expression in the dark, she could imagine the same worried crease in his brow that he’d passed on to his namesake. 

Their mother sat on the bed next to her children, and took her youngest’s hand. Like Helen, their parents knew the nightmares were part of the new normal. Helen had overheard Richard II suggest therapy, much to their mother’s chagrin. Just a session or two of counseling should do the trick. After all, according to Mother, therapy and counseling were quite different.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked gently. He shook his head, glancing at Helen expectantly. 

Helen took her cue from him. “I’ve got it,” she murmured, so that only Mother and Dick could hear. Helen firmly believed that some things were better kept between the Gansey siblings, and as her little brother got older, he seemed to realize this fact as well. 

Helen shared a look with her mother, and Mother shared a look with Father. Mother sighed, turning back to her son, and gently rubbed the crease from his brow with her thumb before planting a kiss on the same spot. “You’re too young for frown lines,” she said quietly. “Get some rest, darling.”

Dick waited until their parents were gone and their footsteps were too far away to be heard before clicking his bedside lamp on. Helen was forced to squint in the sudden light while Dick reached for his glasses. Then he opened a drawer and pulled out the notebook and one of the random pens scattered at the bottom. Flipping to a random page, he looked at Helen. The worry-crease had returned, and now that she could see properly, she could see the fear hadn’t left his hazel eyes. “Do you know who Glendower is?” he asked in a low, breathless voice. 

“I can’t say I’ve ever heard the name.”

Dick was silent for a moment, as if trying to decide if it was worth it to continue talking. “He saved me. That day in the forest.” He searched Helen’s eyes for some hint of doubt. Helen hoped she betrayed none. He took a deep breath and continued, taking Helen’s silence as an invitation to do so. “I should have died. I was dead. But…” he trailed off. “You don’t believe me.”

Helen couldn’t tell if her deepening frown was from skepticism or just from that chaotic day playing over in her head, the whole party searching for her little brother, Mother asking the other kids when they’d seen him last, and one musing that he’d gone off toward the forest. He couldn’t be in the forest still, could he? The sun was setting and Helen’s annoyance at Dick managing to inconvenience the hosts of this party was immediately replaced with anxiety as they’d ventured deeper into the forest calling his name. The anxiety was swallowed up by fear when she’d heard “I think I found him!” And fear replaced with heavy, sinking dread when they’d seen his body covered in leaves, and his skin covered in hives. His breath was no more than a barely audible wheeze that came every few seconds. Helen had never seen her father run, and certainly not with his son in his arms. She had called 911 but hadn’t remembered the conversation, though Mother said she had handled it with such grace. 

The paramedics, doctors, nurses, one after another, told the three Ganseys who were not occupying a bed in the emergency room, that the youngest Gansey was extremely lucky to be alive. Lucky, miracle, extraordinary, words that had been tossed around for the remainder of the evening into the next day. 

“Someone must be watching out for you.” 

“He must have a guardian angel.”

“You must be destined for great things, Dick Gansey.”

Dick Gansey now stared at her, waiting for a response. 

“What do you mean,” Helen said slowly, “Glendower - whoever he is - saved you?”

Her brother opened his moleskine to another page to which the notebook seemed to naturally fall open, as if he had opened it to this page very often. “There was a voice,” he muttered. “The voice said ‘You will live because of Glendower. Someone on the ley line is dying when he should not, and so you will live when you should not.’ Don’t look at me like that.”

“I’m not looking at you like anything.”

“Yes, you are.” He set his jaw indignantly. “And for your information, Glendower is a king from Wales, the last true King of Wales, before the English took it over.” 

“I didn’t know you knew so much about Welsh kings.”

He pushed his glasses further up the bridge of his nose as they started to slip. “When they save your life,” he said with a dry smile, “they become a lot more interesting.”


End file.
